The more time I spend separated from my loved ones, the more it grows my desire to experience a close connection with the strangers around me. This desire inspires the experience recounted below, and the performance Mirror Eyes.

“Some months back as I was returning home late at night in the subway, I noticed a man seated in front of me. He was half asleep and he periodically woke himself up as his head bobbed over his shoulder. As I looked at him I recalled a past observation I had once made: when the train accelerates, the heads of all the people in it tend to simultaneously move back and forth. To me, it appeared as if all the subway car riders were being rocked together. As I looked over at the half asleep man again, I wondered, what would it be like if every time someone was tired the natural behavior of people would be to offer their shoulder. I envisioned all the weary people in the subway car resting their heads on the shoulder of the person beside them.”

Mirror Eyes is an interactive performance that creates shared moments amongst strangers. Dressed in a costume that involves the performer’s body enmeshed within a skin of white mosaic, the performers meet over a platform, also suggestive of white mosaic, and adopt still poses forming sculptural groupings. The poses, which are thought to assume ideal, questionable, and accepted social behaviors, explore notions of togetherness. The audience is invited to join the sculptural groupings by mimicking the postures adopted by the performers. During the poses, the patterns over the performer’s body and on the platform merge together, evoking the disappearance of the performers. The participant members from the audience appear then, as a landscape of bodies engaged on a silent connectedness.